Hi friends. I’m recording this on late Sunday night, Feb 23, as we recover, or attempt to recover, from one of the harder weeks since October 7, 2023.
This is a history podcast, so I want to offer some thoughts as to why this week was hard and perhaps iconic.
When you think of major wars or times of conflict in history, there are certain names, or faces, who become iconic or uniquely associated with that time period.
For instance, the face of the Holocaust. Yes, there are many, but a young Jewish teenager whose diary documenting her life hiding from the Nazis became one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust, Anne Frank. You can probably see her face as I speak.
Or if you think of the Vietnam War, you might not know her name, but you can maybe picture Kim Phuc (Napalm Girl), who was the child in the famous photograph running naked after a napalm attack, becoming a symbol of the war’s horrors.
Or, Sharbat Gula (SHAR-baht GOO-lah), a young Afghan refugee with striking green eyes, who became one of the most famous images of war refugees ever when she was on the cover of National Geographic in 1985.
Or, when you think of conflict in the Middle East, Malala Yousafzai (Muh-LAH-lah Yoo-SUFF-zai). Her advocacy for girls’ education in Taliban-controlled Pakistan made her a global figure, and someone people think of when thinking about the Taliban.
There are names, too many, who are becoming icons of this horrific war.
I believe that for this war, the images that come to me are of two red headed little boys, Ariel and Kfir. The Bibas boys will be remembered as emblems of the horrors of this war, and perhaps their story will actually help the Palestinians.
I’ll explain.
On October 7th, 2023, Yarden Bibas, his wife Shiri Bibas, and their two beautiful boys, 4-year-old Ariel, and 9 month old Kfir were abducted from their safe room of their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz, and brought to Gaza.
You may have seen the video of Shiri clutching her two little boys, like any mama bear would. But, the look on her face was a look of someone who was terrified, out of options, as they were whisked away by gunmen. Yarden was kidnapped separately, with photos showing him with his head covered in blood.
The images of these two little boys spread everywhere, for good reason – Kfir with his beautiful smile, still toothless at 9 months old. Ariel with his long adorable hair, pulled back in a ponytail longer than my daughter’s.
In the days following the attack, rumors swirled. Hamas claimed in November that Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir had been killed in an Israeli airstrike, cynically assigning blame to Israelis for their murders, and assuming the world would either be too uninformed, care too little, or be just antagonistic enough to the concept of Israel that the global community might buy what they’re selling. Hamas had also claimed that other hostages had been killed, and then later were returned to Israel, so, you know, hard for me to take this organization seriously.
Which brings us to this week. On Tuesday, Feb 18, Hamas told us again what we had all feared to be true, but didn’t want to believe – that Kfir and Ariel, their mother, Shiri, and another hostage, Oded Lifshitz, were all dead, and that they would release their four bodies on Thursday. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, could not sleep at night in anticipation, and not the good kind.
On Thursday, Feb 20, after a pathetic public ceremony staged by Hamas with a picture of Bibi Netanyahu with blood coming out of his mouth, invoking images of the famous blood libels, and bringing Palestinian children to celebrate…How could you! How could you poison your children like that?… Hamas handed over four bodies. The UN rights chief condemned the ceremony as abhorrent, and stated that it clearly violated international law. While international law is one thing, it violated basic human decency. Following the ceremony, the bodies were transferred to Israeli authorities and taken to a forensic institute in Tel Aviv for official identification.
On Friday morning, Feb 21, Israel shared the devastating news that Oded, Kfir and Ariel were indeed dead, that they were all probably killed in November 2023. In a televised statement, IDF Spokesman Daniel Hagari had this to say, and I’m saying it in translation, but of course, link for the full video in Hebrew is in the show notes:
“Contrary to Hamas’s lies, Ariel and Kfir were not killed in an airstrike. Ariel and Kfir Bibas were murdered in cold blood by terrorists. The terrorists did not shoot the two young boys — they killed them with their bare hands. Afterward, they committed horrific acts to cover up these atrocities. This assessment is based on both forensic findings, from the identification process, and intelligence that supports these findings. We have shared these findings, intelligence, and forensics with our partners around the world so they can verify it.”
But, the story of the Bibas family gets, I don’t want to say worse, but another twist of a knife. Hagari also shared the shocking information that the fourth body was actually not Shiri’s. Hagari had this to say:
“The body that Hamas falsely claimed was Shiri’s was not hers, nor was it any other hostage. Instead, Hamas sent over the body of an anonymous woman. This is further evidence of Hamas’s barbaric cruelty.”
This is obviously a massive violation of the ceasefire agreement, not to mention evil.
As I’ve said over and over, Hamas’s ideology is not only evil because of its treatment towards Israelis. I think too often the world forgets that part of what makes Hamas so evil is the way they treat Palestinians. The people they’ve hoodwinked some of the world to believe they are trying to represent and help! They murder their own; they don’t protect them.
This woman, whoever this woman is, is reportedly Gazan. She is Palestinian by nationality, she’s from the same nation as Hamas. But they disregarded her. They treated her as just a body to be discarded, violating her, and her family, with this twisted thing, using her body as a pawn and giving her to Israel, pretending that it was Shiri Bibas. I don’t know who she is, I don’t know how she died, I don’t know how she lived. But this woman is a real person, whose death impacted her and her family and her loved ones and the entire world. And for Hamas to do something so twisted, obviously one of many things they’ve done that’s so twisted, is just another reminder about their barbarism towards everyone, including their own people.
Hamas claimed on Friday that it was all a mistake. Again, hard to trust a group who has clearly lied over and over.
On Saturday, a new body was sent back to Israel, and this time, Israel was able to positively ID the body of Shiri Bibas. Chen Kugel, the director of the Abu Kabir National Institute of Forensic Medicine, confirmed that like her sons, there was no evidence that Shiri was killed in an Israeli air strike, and instead, they were murdered by their captors in November 2023. Finally, all four members of the Bibas family are home – but three of four of them, in coffins.
And though I’ve been talking about the Bibas family, for good reason, I have to talk here about the fourth body, no, the fourth person, who was sent back to Israel on Thursday – Oded Lifshitz, who was also killed as a hostage in Gaza in late 2023, at the age of 83. The more I read about Oded, the more I loved and mourned him. His story is incredible. Oded Lifshitz was a dedicated Israeli journalist, peace activist, and one of the founding members of Kibbutz Nir Oz. He was born in Haifa in 1940, before the founding of the state, and helped to establish Kibbutz Nir Oz in 1955, when he was only 15 years old!
Oded was deeply committed to fostering peace and understanding between Israelis and Palestinians. He and his wife, Yocheved, who had also been kidnapped but was released in the initial deal a few weeks after 10/7, volunteered with “Road to Recovery,” an organization that facilitates transportation for Palestinian patients from Gaza to Israeli hospitals. For more than a decade, Oded and his wife would transport sick Gazans to Israeli hospitals to get better care than they would get at Gazan hospitals. Pretty incredible. And it wasn’t just Oded; 7 other members of Road to Recovery were killed by Hamas on October 7, and I want to say their names: Vivian Silver, Tammy Suchman, Eli Orgad, Hayim Katsman, Adi Dagan, and Chaim Peri. I don’t even have words for how inspiring I found these people. They believed in peace, putting their money where their mouths were, just like Oded – and they were killed.
And to me, what’s so crazy to me is something we keep saying, but also, I still find so unfathomable. Hamas decided to attack, kidnap, and murder, many of the Israeli peace camp. People like Oded, who have done more for the people of Gaza than Hamas has ever done – and I’ll come back to that.
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The dizzying last few days has just been completely awful and devastating.
The entire nation of Israel, who is reliving the pain of October 7th over and over and over. Many people just feel shattered.
I’ll be honest, for me, at this very moment, now is not the time for the classic Noam, the measured conversation, for talking about context and empathy and balance. We’re too raw for that right now. I know I am. I won’t do a good job. I will fail that assignment.
For me, now is the time for slowing down, for letting ourselves feel feelings, as I talk to my kids about. Now is the time for living in our pain. And, it’s the time for love. For….I don’t know, singing, for mourning, for reflection, for connection with our family and loved ones.
And, it is the time for the Palestinians to create an identity independent of Hamas.
Much of the world is starting to believe that the Palestinians support Hamas. Matti Friedman—who has always been a moral ballast for me, and a level-headed person—reflecting on this spectacle, argued that Hamas has mass support among Palestinians, who share their twisted worldview. Is this true? What are the implications if it is true?
It is the time for the world to once and for all say, ENOUGH.
And this is what I mean when I say that.
Listen, I have a fear.
My fear is that IF you are suspicious about the story of Israel or Israelis or Jews, hearing all of this from me will be irrelevant to you. My fear is that, with all my effort to be conscious of my own biases on this podcast, to be genuinely centrist in orientation, to be nuanced, to show multiple sides of issues, to criticize my own people, etc. You may just not hear me on this because I am me, I am a Jewish American.
While I wish more of us invoked the philosophy of, “Accept the truth from whomever,” I am aware that for many, we live in a world where the source often matters more than the content itself.
So, on all of this, how about the voice of a Palestinian?
Would we take a Palestinian’s voice seriously about all this?
A Palestinian who has had over 30 people in his family killed by Israel during this war?
What would you say if you heard it from him?
Well, my friend Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib tweeted this. It’s long, so please bear with me, but I want to read what he said in entirety.
“I feel immense shame and pain seeing the barbarism that Hamas & a slew of terror organizations put on in Gaza – the depravity of armed men thinking it’s courageous to parade the bodies of literal toddlers and their mother as some trophy for victory; the sickness, evil, and stupidity required to believe that marching with a locked coffin of an 85-year-old peace activist who did so much for Gazans is somehow good for the Palestinian cause. Instead of having a parade for a dead mother, her two babies, and an elderly man of peace, their bodies should have been handled by medical crews with no armed terrorists in sight. This could have been done differently, but Jihadi fascists chose the appalling spectacle instead.
I’m ashamed of any Palestinian who supports or justifies this; I’m ashamed of any “pro-Palestine” activists, “journalists,” or “experts” who are going out of their way to whitewash this and blame Israeli bombardment for killing Israeli hostages without blaming Hamas for taking hostages in the first place.
Those who attacked me repeatedly for calling out Hamas and their Jihadi fascism from day one never seem to understand why I view them as a far more serious existential threat to the Palestinian people than any far-right party or government in Israel. Hamas isn’t just bringing death and destruction upon the Palestinian people; it is decaying and eroding the value system of the Palestinian society and causing rot and degradation from within. This is a serious and terrible consequence of the group’s actions that will decimate hopes for Palestinian freedom, independence, and sovereignty, not to mention respect among the nations of the world.
What transpired today isn’t just illegal, immoral, vile, and disgusting; to me, and many who aspire to have a Palestine worth fighting for, it is a matter of values and principles. It’s imperative for all Palestinians of conscience, even if they’re furious at Israel for what it did to Gaza after October 7, to speak out and say not in our name. It is imperative to distance the Palestinian people from the depraved evil and vile display of fascist cowardice that’s masquerading as “resistance.”
It’s time to reject Hamas and separate the Palestinian people’s just and urgent aspirations from a despicable death cult that’s dehumanizing our people time and again. It’s time to denounce all the pro-“resistance” terror enthusiasts in New York, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere who keep cheering on Hamas and are celebrating the shameful parade of dead children, their mother, and an elderly peace activist.
I am ashamed that my once beautiful Gaza, with a vibrant society that stood for values and had so much potential to be the crown jewel of the Palestinian people, has been degraded and embarrassed by inhumane terrorists who are a stain on the Palestinians and their cause. Gaza is not Hamas despite the terror group’s control. I have seen dozens of Palestinians in the Strip condemning what took place today and denouncing the inhumanity of Hamas.
Saying these words does not making me “self-hating,” for I am proud of my Palestinian heritage and care deeply about my people.
To the Bibas and Lifshitz families, I am truly sorry for your loss – I grieve with you, and I share your pain. We shall overcome.”
See, this is the voice of someone who is proudly Palestinian, who loves his identity, who cares about his people…and to him, caring about his people means not allowing Hamas to continue, not allowing the world to think that Palestinians are synonymous with Hamas.
So, that’s why I said, maybe, just maybe, this moment will help the Palestinian people. Maybe, just maybe, this moment will be the moment that will force the world to put its proverbial foot down, to not allow Hamas to continue functioning, and to assist the Palestinians to assert their identity independent of Hamas.
That’s my hope for the Palestinian people. Amidst this insanity and this chaos, and this violence, I am so deeply mad but I so deeply want them to be free from Hamas. That’s what I hope for them. And they need to free themselves, and the world needs to assist them.
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The Bibas boys are the face of this past 500 days. A deeply emotional symbol of this war—two beautiful red-haired children, brutally taken hostage and murdered in captivity. Their story encapsulates the tragedy, the loss, and the sheer brutality of what happened on October 7 and beyond.
These pictures, these people, Anne Frank, Sharbat Gula, Kim Phuc (Napalm Girl), Malala Yousafzai, stay with us forever, for so many reasons, but I think, first and foremost, because of the lost innocence. No child should be killed. No child should have gone through what these kids have gone through.
This week, you were supposed to hear a regular episode of Unpacking Israeli History, but honestly, it’s just not the week for it. I don’t think it’s the week for thinking about the larger concept of Israel, of Zionism, of ideas and, as I said before, context. This is the week for thinking about real human beings. Ariel and Kfir and Shiri and Oded and the thousands of other people who have been killed in this conflict are not just numbers and facts, they’re humans whose lives ended too soon.
Ariel and Kfir, we love you, we miss you, and we’re sorry we let you down.
We can’t bring them back. But maybe, just maybe, we can make sure their story shapes what comes next.